Patch 5.4 Unannounced FeaturesBashiok responded to a question about the unannounced feature today.

Flex Raiding Q&A
There are lots of discussions going about this new feature on the forums!

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Can I run a Flex raid with 10 rogues and zero healers and zero tanks?
It doesn't change the mechanics of what raids are, it's a variable difficulty that scales on the number of people you have. You'll still need tanks, you'll still need healers, and you'll still need DPS; the fundamental archetypes of the game aren't changing.

If your guild or group of friends isn't attempting raids now outside of LFR, you might have some roles you're not filling, but you certainly could get to that point. Certainly expect people to be building PUGs and such, but that's not really the intended target. The immediately intended target of Flex is to allow the more casual guilds that are already making small attempts at Normal (and probably hit a brick wall early on in ToT) to more easily get weekly groups together to have fun and progress on content that's more suited for their pace. They want to see the content, want some challenge in progressing, but aren't so hardcore as to be sitting people out or demanding requirements of those playing. Jump in and play the game with friends, have fun, low stress, Flex.

I hope it helps with reviving the pugging scene I met a lot of friends that way.
Absolutely. Just the process of people putting groups together for things and having that need for some coordination in the content, you end up seeing the same people over and over, make friends, and that in no small part helps to build long-term in-game relationships and feeds into healthy guilds.

So if a 10 man raid group thats casually doing Normal modes decides to do a flex raid, its just plain easier. no doubts there.

But if they bring their 10 man, and then 5 more healer friends, how does it scale? Just plain scaling of the bosses HP? wouldn't it mean those 5 other healer friends are kind of dead weight?
If you're thinking strictly in terms of "what is optimal for us to complete this content efficiently" then Flex is probably not targeted at you.

Balancing will come out during the PTR though, I don't think we'll get into how it'll scale too much before then. It'll err on the side of the group, and ensuring they can meaningfully progress in a reasonable amount of time.

But only 25m casual groups or 10m groups with large rosters, right? A small, casual 10m group that ends up missing people on a given night won't really be able to take advantage of the flex system to "just raid anyway" with their friends, which I think is a shame.

I'd love to see a little more flex allowing for maybe 8-28 raiders or something, so that 25m groups can also take advantage of the new flex raids to not have to bench friends, and 10m groups can worry less about having their raid night cancelled because of one or two missing raiders.
Raid mechanics start to break down when you go much below 10 players. There are still assumptions of having 2 tanks and 2 healers, and some mechanics are not really able to scale with much fewer DPS. Raids are still going to be raids, and raids are designed with some 'givens' to ensure the mechanics can be interesting, complex, and challenging.

But unlike Normal and Heroic, you CAN invite BattleTag/RealID friends to a Flex raid of the current tier, and so if you're short you can fill it out with people you know, instead of spamming chat to pick up randoms.

The designers are discussing allowing you to at least enter the raid with 8+ people. The intent would be to allow a group to start clearing trash while they wait for a couple stragglers, as the difficulty with less than 10 would still be scaled for 10. It could allow for skilled/geared players to do it with less than 10, but some mechanics just may not be possible as we're not designing for it.

Can they leave and have the raid automatically adjust on the fly? How about adding people after it starts?
Yes, and yes. It's dynamic.

How is it going to scale for healers? If I'm taking 17 players how will I know how many healers I will need?
You'll still want a standard raiding DPS/Healer ratio. It doesn't look at class or spec, it's purely scaling for number of players. It'll be up to the raid leader, and depending on gear and skill it'll be different for every group of people how much they can really deviate and how those deviations affect their rate of progression.

Again, it's going to be up to the PTR and seeing how testing progresses to determine how balancing shakes out and what's possible. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We just made tech which could made life of 25-men a lot easier. Let's give it to LFR folks. -.-
This isn’t for LFR folks, it’s for Normal folks (ahem... you know what I mean) that were going into LFR and weren’t having an enjoyable raiding experience or that just wanted an easy way to play with friends and family without spending too much time organizing it. These players would go to LFR only for gear, not for the experience, and that’s not really what we want to see happening.

I’m hoping that players who are looking for more challenging content, but have no time to get into the usual guild raiding schedules, will start to switch from LFR to Flexible Raids.

Highly skilled players with heavy time constraints have always felt a bit left out from MMORPGs, but maybe there are ways we can deal with that.

Ideally, skill should be equally or even better rewarded than time, but there needs to be a balance between the two, we can’t provide 30 minutes of insanely difficult content with the best rewards that only 0.001% of the player base would be able reach, but we also can’t do the opposite and make rewards exclusively and directly proportional with time spent. Skill needs to enter into the equation and needs to have a pretty strong weight.

LFR still has its own place, some players are quite content with it, some have no intention of going any further than LFR in terms of raiding and are happy with the experience it provides. We’re just trying to provide content for everyone to enjoy.

This is just a preview, 5.4 isn’t even on the PTR yet, many things can still change. This is also part of the reason why we’re sharing this information with you all; the feedback we get will help us to better shape our next major content patch. I've already seen quite a few interesting and unexpected arguments in this thread and we'll share them with the devs, so keep it up!

With a new raid lockout things will indeed change (not for everyone, of course). If you want to stay ahead and on the top of your game, you'd want to run both the 5.4 LFR and LFR+ since they most likely will wield upgrades, whether it be because you want to mixmax for your normal/heroic raid progress or because you want to see your character evolve.
That’s a good point, I believe that a few players might do that for a little while, but I would like to point out that the unlocking of Flexible Raids and LFR are very similar but on different timetables, this will probably mean that normal and heroic will open first, then FR and then LFR.

So by the time LFR opens, chances are, there won’t be that many upgrades left for let’s say, a fully heroic equipped 5.3 raider, which is the typical player that usually tries to get upgrades wherever and whenever possible.

I think it's an amazing idea, but I would like to see it 8-25 or 5-25 if possible + make the loot the same ilvl as normal and make flexi and normal share the lockout, or even replace the whole normal with 8-25 mode.

If there are 11-12 one night, the guild has to decide to do the low ilvl with all players, or do the high ilvl but 1-2 are left out.. and i'm almost positive they will choose the higher ilvl.
Yes that will probably happen to some extent in some groups, but that will depend on how hard the content really turns out to be and the ilvl difference between those “extra” players and the rest.
So, yes, it’s possible that some groups form with the intent to be as efficient as possible, so those will only include the best geared players in the smallest possible group.

I don’t think we should worry too much about that to be honest, in the end it’s all up to whoever organizes the raid, and that has always been the case. I sincerely doubt that most groups will leave people behind just for a small difference in terms of item level. Besides, ilvl isn’t everything, every guild decides on whom to bring to the raids based on many different factors, gear is only one of them, there’s skill, there’s personality, there’s knowledge…

Then let us assign loot to players whilst doing it please. One of my initial thoughts about this was it would be a useful way to help undergeared (whether through bad luck, absence due to real-life, or because they are trailists that need a little boost in ilevel) team members improve their gear.

Then I read that this new difficulty would be using the current lfr loot roll system. This would be a hindrance to such help. It would be useful if this decision were reconsidered, so that raiding guilds could assign gear to members based on need for helping us progress through normal's and heroic's.
There's nothing that cannot be reconsidered and iterated before a patch goes live, we'll share your input about the loot system with the devs.

Sorry, but I don't see that the traditional loot distribution would work with flexible raid size. If they add brackets to how many items drop based in a fixed amount of people (ie 2 with 10, 3 with 15, 4 with 20, 5 with 25) people would just pick enough people to reach that.
That’s a very good point; I assume that's probably the reason why this loot system was chosen in the first place. But like I said, everything is still subject to change, devs sometimes like to surprise us with unexpected solutions. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Titan Runestone Drop RateCan you clarify, are you still limited to one runestone total from as many Lei Shen's you kill per week? (one normal/heroic and as many lfrs as you can stomach)
Each character has always had one chance off an eligible boss (regardless of difficulty mode) per week for the Legendary quest drop.

Does that mean, if i do LFR and then raid with my guild i can have a chance off LFR and normal/heroic mode too?
If you have already defeated Lei Shen on Normal difficulty that week, you would not get an additional chance by defeating him on Raid Finder.

Is the chance of a runestone droping the same regaurdless of if you kill the boss first in LFR, Normal, or Heroic Mode?
The chance is the same regardless of difficulty/mode.

I don't believe this is true. It may be for Titan Runestones, but for the Secrets of the Empire, my guildies got them at roughly 4x the LFR rate from normal mode. To be more specific, a couple of them finished this step in half the time I did, despite starting later, only doing the first 4-6 bosses in normal mode, and never doing LFR. (I did every boss in LFR every week and very rarely did anything on normal).
The chance is random but remains the same across different difficulties. Your guildmates just happen to encounter a streak of good luck while running Normal difficulty.

The guaranteed drop from Lei Shen is meant to be an upper cap for players that experience a streak of bad luck. The discussion seems to be if this upper cap is still too long. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PvP Item Level Cap IncreaseBlizzard are trying to remove the fact that gear is needed to do arena so ye i dont think they will increase the ilvl cap in arenas.
No, we still want gear to matter in PvP to allow for a sense of power progression, but we simply didn't like that it was such a large factor in player victories previously. We will be increasing the cap in patch 5.4 for the next season, however we don't want to have the Ilvl cap suddenly jump up instantly to ensure that those with high Ilvl PvE gear don't suddenly out gear those in PvP gear, but rather everyone's Ilvl will increase together. We will try to share more about this as soon as we have more information on it for you. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

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1.) Now people will just overhype the possibility of some other new, amazing, world saving, feature.
2.) Instead of just maning up and saying "This is X feature that WE got overhyped because WE kept giving hints for the past few patches" they just come out and make a statement that is going to cause more trouble than its worth! Just come out and say what it was so we can move on, all bash did was give more room for insane expectations.
3.) ITS NOT A PONY! GC promised me a pony :T

Glad to see not everybody is up in arms over Flex Raiding. Honestly, it does fill a niche out there that is found in most MMORPGs when they reach the age WoW has; a bunch of kids who started in Vanilla now have jobs and lives and they may not be able to devote their nights to the game.

LFR is pretty much to dip your toes into raiding: to learn how to function with a large group of people, follow multiple boss mechanics, and overall learn the function of your character in a raid setting .. all while getting geared. Flex is for people who know how to raid, know their character, and know not to stand in fire. They have the skill they just don't have the time to be on a set raiding schedule. It's an interesting idea that someone can tag along with another guild who consistently runs 10m without having to be benched or without screwing the raid if you have to leave early or show up late.

Save face? Seeing as people had the wildest, most unrealistic ideas of what the new feature could be, Blizzard is trying to tell these people it's never going to live up to their expectations. If people would just act rational, Blizzard wouldn't have to be so careful with every word they write. No matter what the new feature is, it's going to cause angry posts on every forum demanding something else instead. It's never good enough.

LFR is pretty much to dip your toes into raiding: to learn how to function with a large group of people, follow multiple boss mechanics, and overall learn the function of your character in a raid setting .. all while getting geared. Flex is for people who know how to raid, know their character, and know not to stand in fire. They have the skill they just don't have the time to be on a set raiding schedule. It's an interesting idea that someone can tag along with another guild who consistently runs 10m without having to be benched or without screwing the raid if you have to leave early or show up late.

I suppose that's one of looking at it. I think if you know how to raid, how your character, and you know not stand in fire, you're going to be just as bored in a Flexible raid as you are in LFR.

My biggest issue with LFR and Flexible raid is that it focuses primarily on people who can't get through Normal, for whatever the reason. While this may be the majority, it still leaves a portion of their loyal subscribers outside in the rain, because we can get through the content.

brawlers guild is a feature. pet battles are a feature. LFD/LFR is a feature.

right now I dont see anything to be excited about in 5.4, other than the raid itself. I thought they were going to do something like allow people to run scaled down/up content (like with challenge modes), but with old dungeons/raids. still, they need to step their game up. the 5.3 content is really lacking: imo 5.1 was far better (at least the story quests were interesting, I was done with the barrens in a single day).

Ideally, skill should be equally or even better rewarded than time, but there needs to be a balance between the two, we can’t provide 30 minutes of insanely difficult content with the best rewards that only 0.001% of the player base would be able reach, but we also can’t do the opposite and make rewards exclusively and directly proportional with time spent. Skill needs to enter into the equation and needs to have a pretty strong weight.

There is a recent response to why players who put more effort into the game get rewarded more despite the cries of those who believe effort shouldnt matter.

Originally Posted by Pipkadin

I don't get this Blizz mentality, that everybody have to see the content. It's canon for them now and it's bad idea tbh. It's same like spoilering movie so you just don't care to see it anymore.

A lot of players used to be busy with things like dungeons but the grind doesnt last long especially with the introduction of LFD which has greatly accelerated the rate of dungeon burnout. Raids with their week long lockout and RNG gear factor can keep players on the grind far longer with slower gearing rates and chances of burnout. Blizzard was already making the raids so making a way to get more players to do something like raids which is a more long term grind is good for Blizzard. It doesnt mean that everyone doing LFR likes raiding, it just keeps them busy. In the Q&A they already said that there are players who dont like LFR yet are left with that being their only option.

It would be nice if there was alternative options other than raiding that offered character advancement for a similar level of effort. Sadly we cant because then players would ask for nerfs because they want the rewards and not the content.

Flex raiding...(( underwhelming))... another mandatory raid lock out. And who is this marketing to? the small % of people who still raid but don't want to do 25man instead 11-24? seems odd.

No, its for guilds with unstable rosters. i.e. Every single non-hardcore guild. i.e. The majority.

Please, keep whining and saying how manditory it is to get sub-normal ilevel gear. Its amusing. Especially considering many of these comments are from people who whined that 10 and 25 man are on seperate lockouts.

So they're putting all these resources into making it so people who are 1/12 normal feel like they're raiding too. Baby's first raid. The people that are 1/12 should just realize they suck and stick to lfr or pvp.

So they're putting all these resources into making it so people who are 1/12 normal feel like they're raiding too. Baby's first raid. The people that are 1/12 should just realize they suck and stick to lfr or pvp.

Yeah the game would be much better if they spent all their dev resources on elitist asshats.